Learning about learning

Loving Learning

I'm at Learning Solutions 2015, in Orlando, Florida. It's big conference #2 of 3 for me for this year. I just love this stuff. I presented a program this year on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which was a new topic to many. UDL is about making learning accessible and equivalent for all learners. Most elearning designers generate a transcript for audio portions of video, select colors that are color-blind friendly, and may even write tags for pictures that are screen reader friendly. UDL goes beyond that and considers the remedial learner, the gifted learner, the ESL learner, the dyslexic learner and any other learner who may take the program, and provides avenues that consider varied ways to present the WHAT of learning (representation) the HOW of learning (activities and expressions) and the WHY of learning (engagement). Thinking through and planning for these learners makes for a richer experience that benefits all. I'll write more about that another time.

Motivation

I've been coming to this conference nearly every year since 2002 during the early years of the eLearning Guild. This is such a great conference! I love being able to present, I love attending with sessions, I love the learning, but most of all, I love connecting with the people that I meet. I have learned so much over the past 13 years from my colleagues as we have wrestled together over issues, and learned from one another. The Guild truly is a community of practice, and has been a catapult for my career. I've had the opportunity to introduce my colleagues to the Guild and this year had the privilege of watching two people from my former team present for the first time. Now I get to watch them grow as they connect the dots from the people they have met and the workshops they attended.

This year I got to meet some new friends whose workshops took me in directions I've never considered before, despite working in eLearning for 18 years.

New Faces, New Discoveries

Hadiya presented on leveraging non-fiction writing techniques for writing elearning scenarios. I'd never thought about that before. Thinking about the constructs of plot, story line and context made a lot of sense. Thinking about whose perspective you are writing from and for was a big keeper as well.

As a bonus, I learned about RACI charts on her website. Definitely a keeper for project management role definitions!

I've been chatting with David on Twitter, where he is @criticallearner, for several years so it was really fun to meet him in person. He taught us a slew of training hacks. My two favorites were using Siri to transcribe audio, and to change the extension of a PPTx file to .zip and it will extract all of the images in the file into a folder called Images. That is super helpful when you are moving things over from a storyboard.

Ty MarbutTy Marbut Instructional Videos

Ty is a twenty-something who ran circles around me. For those of you who know me well, that takes some doing. Ty showed me a bunch of neat video tricks and introduced me to the concept of interactive videos, which isn't nearly as hard as one would imagine. I love the concept and can't wait to try this one out.

Dave AndersonCommunity Manager, Articulate

I'd read Dave Anderson for years, so it was fun to come and learn some tricks from him in person. He taught us to leverage mindmapping to create a design treatment for an elearning piece. We walked through six steps, and came out with the colors, fonts, elements and people types that belong in a piece. That was fun and complemented Hadiya's piece really well.

Jason Kramer & Naomi PariseaultNECB eLearning

This was their first conference presentation, and it was fun to watch their creativity unleashed.

One Day to Go!

If we weren't full enough, there's yet another half day tomorrow, ending with a keynote on Design Thinking. I'm looking forward to topping off my learning tank for the week with some new inspiration. Thank you eLearning Guild for the hard work to pull this off year after year.